Companies and organizations operate computer networks that interconnect numerous computing systems to support their operations. The computing systems can be located in a single geographical location (e.g., as part of a local network) or located in multiple distinct geographical locations (e.g., connected via one or more private or public intermediate networks). Data centers can house significant numbers of interconnected computing systems (e.g., private data centers operated by a single organization, and public data centers operated by third parties) to provide computing resources to customers. Public and private data centers can provide network access, power, hardware resources (e.g., computing and storage), and secure installation facilities for hardware owned by the data center, an organization, or by other customers.
To facilitate increased utilization of data center resources, virtualization technologies can allow a single physical computing machine to host one or more instances of virtual machines that appear and operate as independent computer machines to a connected computer user. With virtualization, the single physical computing device can create, maintain or delete virtual machines in a dynamic manner. In turn, users can request computer resources from a data center and be provided with varying numbers of virtual machine resources on an “as needed” basis or at least on an “as requested” basis.
Data centers provide various services associated with network-based computing, data storage, and data transfer. As the scale and scope of data centers has increased, the task of generating invoices to customers of these services has become increasingly complex, requiring extensive computational resources. In addition, invoice generation typically involves multiple iterations through all invoice line items and numerous network service calls to identify supplemental charges associated with each invoice line item. Network calls can increase latency, thereby draining data center resources and delaying invoice production.